Dr. Timothy G. Bromage

Hard Tissue Research Unit

Dep'ts of Biomaterials & Basic Sciences, Rm 817-S

New YorkUniversityCollege of Dentistry

NYU Mail Code: 9448

345 East 24th Street

New York, NY 10010-4086

USA

On Complexity and the Integration of Art, Science, and the Mystic

We can safely say that existence is complex, and here we confront ourselves with the very foundation of human complexity; that is, the interplay between art, science, and the mystic and, indeed, our ability to comprehend it.

Whatdo I mean by complex? To our senses complexity it is not something that is necessarily complicated. A school of fish, a flock of birds, or an army of ants behaves in a way that fits easily within our experience; there is an order, a phenomenon we call natural. However, behind the apparent order of nature and the simple rules it appears to follow, is complexity beyond our comprehension and our technical ability to characterize and measure it. It is a matter of scale, and by scale I mean the real number of objects under scrutiny;for instance, a single fish, a few, or very very many.

An individual fish, bird, or antbehaves very differently than a school, a flock, or an army, and therein lays the complexity. The difference in behavior at extreme scales, from individual to large group, seems simple, but it is, in fact, so complex that the mechanisms responsible for thephysical(i.e. structural) and social (i.e. behavioral) transitions that group members make at different scales cannot be explained or readily modeled. We are, however,coming to a better understanding of complexitywithin whichthe human relationship between art, science, and the mystic may reveal itself. So, let us see if we can identify the features underlying this relationship.

Complexity has several essential features:in the language of science, they are nonlinearity, positive feedback loops, and phase transitions.Further, these three features are universally attributed to networks exhibiting hierarchical modularity. What does this jargon mean, and how can we translate this into our interest in the relationship between art, science and the mystic?

When a single artist, scientist, or mystic believer practices,we witness their craft as a personal endeavor, if even we have opinions, as we all will, about the worth, quality, importance, etc., of what they are doing. Their pursuit gives them all the sensations of life: pleasure, frustration, memories, sadness, sleepless nights, fulfillment as a human being, and more. Their behavior, or, how they practice their craft,maychange through time as they acquirenew experiences, but their search for truth and meaning endures. All artists, scientists, and mystics, in the absence of threats to their existence, will keep their talent, their passion, and their faith targeted along a path they set for themselves. Individuals are the linearthreads of humanity that test both themselves and usall with their novel ideas about the world, leading us ever forward into the present. This understood, we must now ask ourselves how thelinear behaviors of individuals could be transformed into the nonlinear phenomena andpositive feedback loopsof complex systems.

It requires only one particularly well informed, enlightened, or obsessively persuasive and charismatic individual havingproclaimed answers about the worldto draw the attention of many people. We all have the experience that an artist, scientist, or mystic who presents a new perspective and world view, is potentially able to elicit a response from their community of practitioners, many of whom take up this perspective and apply it in their own work.

For instance, many European artists of the early 1900’sengaged in an avant-garde movement we call Cubism. This perspectiveconferred a benefit;Cubistpractitioners, the most notable being the Frenchman Georges Braque and the Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, were aligned in time and space, however briefly, into a community, or module in the parlance of complexity science. Their association was with an idea that defined itself artistically to be sure, but socially also. It was, indeed, a group of people that self-assembled and that was sustained in a positive feedback loop. This is another way of saying that, by performing Cubist art, the members of this group were positively supported by their community in hopes that their ideas would gain notoriety and change the world view.

However, this effort to change the world view became something more; it became a movement that was not simply the summed aggregate of behaviors of its individual practitioners. The linear tasks took on a new form, which was the nonlinear synergy between art, science, and the mystic. Linear behaviors, which were beneficially supported in a positive feedback loop, became nonlinear. The nonlinear response generated a phase transition.

Phase transitions are common features of our everyday lives. They include the transformation of water into ice at low temperature and, in our example here, include cubists integrating art, scientific ideas about time and space, and social, political, and mysticalsentiments of the early 20th Century. Cubism arose in tandem with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Cubists, like quantum mechanists, did not perceive time as linear, and space was representative in nonlinear time as cubic structures. Guillaume Apollinaire, in his 1913essay Les Peintres cubists, wrote "Today, scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term: the fourth dimension."

Equally inextricable from the milieu of art and science was the mystic. In Kenneth Rexroth’s discourse on the Cubist poetry of Pierre Reverdy, he writes: “Vertigo, rapture, transport, crystalline and plangent sounds, shattered and refracted light, indefinite depths, weightlessness, piercing odors and tastes, and synthesizing these sensations and affects, an all-consuming clarity. These are the phenomena that often attend what theologians call natural mysticism”. While scientists were struggling to comprehend the material facts of nature, mystics interpreted the wonder of the theorized space-time continuum as something transcending the intellect.

This example demonstrates that a complex system combining art, science, and the mystic is actually a shared pattern of behavior that gives meaning to life and the world. Shared patterns of behavior are more commonly appreciated as the glue that holds human societies together; that is, a phase we call culture. These three parts, when combined, undergo a phase transition that, in fact, gives consequence to what it means to be human. Our culture and, indeed, our humanity, will degrade if one part is taken away or perverted.

For example, if art is removed from the system, the identifying links of color, form, and pattern that defines everything from our personal adornment to our architecture, and that binds humans together,will disappear. The human need to belong is lost in the absence of art.

If science were removed from the system, our powers of observation would fail us miserably, and our responses to an ever changing world would beillogical, worthless, and lead to our demise as a race. The Human need to survive loses hope in the absence of science.

If mysticism was removed from the system, our comprehension of the force that binds us and the universe together would be chaotic, and human societies would descend into anarchy. The Human need for transcendental order is unraveled in the absence of mysticism.

This essay on the relationship of art, science, and the mystic is rooted in the science of complexity. It is from this perspective, one of science, that our shared patterns of behavior make sense, which givessubstance to our understanding of existence, and which creates the multiplicity of cultures in the world, enriching all humanity. Our challenge is to be cognizant of the need to develop each of these areas of human existence equally, without bias to one or the other, if we are to move positively forward into the complex world.